I can see that there are roughly 3k players, but how's matchmaking times without friends?

[São Tiago Da Tocha Acesa]

Has stated, the game is not completely "dead" but it's a niche.
I wanted to get it, but how's the queue times playing with randoms?

[0.01 KD]

3k online it is top100 of global steam online ;) why people write "dead" on such popular game? here online always was good and continue to be.

use quick join, and you always will find people for 3 sec, even at 03:00 of morning :-P

p.s.: most of people play on nightmare, so if you want to play with people, use this difficulty during quick join.

Also, you can find party on veteran or on no hope, but there are much more less people

P.s.: if you don't find people for 3 sec with quick join, then mb you live in not good region (where people dosen't play on b4b)

[Knee]

can also say quickplay never has trouble finding players

trying to find a game from creating your own might take a while

[Crazy_One[F8S]]

Depends on whether you have crossplay enabled. if its not it can take a while. With crossplay on you get idiots on the consoles being asshats for the most part. I did 5 quick play joins tonight, zero good team mates. Other than that its ok.

[^9[DSS]Dahaka]

Enable crossplay and there will be at least 3k players on PS, Xbox, and gamepass, each.

[Terron]

I never have trouble getting players. If you quickplay into a game you will get a game no problem. If you set up your own you might start out solo with 3 bots but within a few minutes random people will join you through quickplay. Enable crossplay to drastically increase the chance of people joining of course.

[FatherOfTheAbyss]

Originally posted by ^9DSSDahaka:

Enable crossplay

Famous Last Words haha

[Reeva!]

If you disable crossplay, your mileage will vary quite a bit.
If you enable it, you'll find a lobby pretty easily.

For me, I've used quickplay a fair bit recently, I keep finding lobbies with either 1 person, and it stays that way for the rest of the campaign, or, I find 3 people who immediately leave after our current mission is done. Idk if it's a bug, it happens frequently for some reason.

Matchmaking is weird, I've been put into lobbies that are about to end very often. If I quit, the game keeps throwing me back into the same lobby, despite other lobbies being available if I change my criteria, and then I have better ping in the lobbies the game wouldn't let me join.

You'll find games easily. Whether you'll get to play it out fully is up to a very skewed chance. No pausing, voice and chat servers sometimes disconnect randomly which limits communication in teams, so if someone wants to take a piss, or get a drink, they just can't, they'll have to leave or afk. Every campaign (except Act 4) takes quite a while.

edit: I've been doing a loot goblin run, been a few hours, no one's joined at all. I have crossplay enabled, but, I'm in South Africa, so I kinda expected it. If I didn't live here, I imagine it'd be different, but regional matchmaking has put me with Chinese players before. Maybe it's a quiet night.

[Raft]

At peak hours (evenings/night), it's easy to find matches across all difficulty levels within 1-3 minutes. At off-peak hours, it's hard to find other random players at the highest difficulty level (no hope). The game simply starts a fresh campaign with me as the only player.

[Waggish]

In the US, without crossplay enabled it can take maybe 3-5mins to find a game in quickplay. With crossplay enabled, Recruit difficulty pops in less than a minute most of the time, and since you'll be new to the game, you'll be on that difficulty for a little while as you unlock cards.

I hate to generalize, but it truly is a trend that console players (especially Xbox) in Recruit/Veteran difficulty can be a total pain in the ass to play with. Loud open mics, won't turn around to shoot the 3-8 zombies smacking the back of their head, won't drop ammo/money to pool resources, won't open loot rooms despite being the only one with a toolkit to do so... I think Gamepass is the culprit, since they're generally just trying it out and have no intention of sticking with it. Playing offline with just bots is 100% viable - they'll always drop ammo for you, they'll ping useful things and highlight the big bad zombies, have cards that will boost you, and most of the time you can even get them to heal at healing stations and open said loot doors if the bot character spawns with a toolkit.

I say that to prepare you, rather than dissuade you. Like L4D, a lot of this game is learning how to pull through when everything that can go wrong does go wrong. If you ever find yourself truly loathing the randoms you got teamed up with, you can always leave that game and re-queue without penalty (other than not getting the supply points for completing the mission). I don't actually know if blocking them prevents you from getting teamed with them again, but I always do it anyway. =V